Saw this while getting my daily dose of echo-chamber nuttery over at FreeRepublic, and just had to go “WTF????”. The thread is on Why Pay Physicians Anything at all for Providing Health Care based on a Townhall article. The gist of the article is that it’s not doctors salaries that are driving health care costs, but medical liability and 3rd party payment systems.

That’s not the part that made my head spin however.

The kicker for me was a post that I’ll quote verbatim, so you can dwell on the utter lack of awareness the poster shows. The text is as written, the only additions I have made is to bold the parts that just made me go “ARE YOU INSANE?”

To: Kaslin

The 3rd party payment system is perhaps the most potent driver of runaway healthcare spending.

Many leftists accept, in the abstract, the notion that scarce resources should be allocated to those who need them the most. What they (and all too many Republicans) fail to grasp is that not only does a person’s willingness to pay for something correlate very strongly with need, but it is far less corruptible than other metrics. Those who outbid everyone else for scarce resources get the resources, but have to pay for them. Those who don’t bid high enough to get the resources are compensated by not having to pay for them, and will consequently have more money with which they can bid on other things.

Allocating things based upon willingness to pay thus gives people a major incentive to minimize their need for scarce resource. Conversely, many other allocation methods reward those who try to maximize their real or apparent needs. Policies which reward need will beget more need, to the point that demands become insatiable. Only if policies reward those who minimize need, can needs possibly be met.

43 posted on 3/18/2013 6:15:14 PM by supercat (Renounce Covetousness.)
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According to this poster, (and for the record, nobody yet at FR has raised an objection), If you can pay for something, that shows that you NEEDED it more than the person who couldn’t match your price. The plus side is that if you’re poor, all the money you save by not having medical care is available for other things.

If ever there was a post that summed up the “I’ve got mine, and if you don’t have any, you don’t deserve any” attitude of the extreme right, this is it. I know it’s early in the year, but this might just be the most facepalmingly stupid thing I’ll read this year.

Have a good one,

RBS